Littlefoot: A Poem - Hardcover

Wright, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374189668 ISBN 13: 9780374189662

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007

Synopsis

After the end of something, there comes another end,
This one behind you, and far away.
Only a lifetime can get you to it,
and then just barely.

Littlefoot, the eighteenth book from one of this country's most acclaimed poets, is an extended meditation on mortality, on the narrator's search of the skies for a road map and for last instructions on "the other side of my own death." Following the course of one year, the poet's seventieth, we witness the seasons change over his familiar postage stamps of soil, realizing that we are reflected in them, that the true affinity is between writer and subject, human and nature, one becoming the other, as the river is like our blood, "it powers on, / out of sight, out of mind." Seeded with lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, here we meet solitude, resignation, and a glad cry that while a return to the beloved earth is impossible, "all things come from splendor," and the urgent question that the poet can't help but ask: "Will you miss me when I'm gone?

About this title

About the Author:

Charles Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Review:

“Has any other American poet been writing as beautifully and daringly over the past twenty-five years as Charles Wright? Possibly. But I cannot imagine who it would be . . . Wright has a hunk of the ineffable in his teeth and he won't let go. In poem after poem he plumbs our deepest relationships with nature, time, love, death, creation.” ―Philip Levine, American Poet, citation for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize on Charles Wright

“His easy meditative line, drawing on details of nature and history, is never laconic, but full of flashes and jolts to another order of awareness . . . Such poetry welcomes the reader into its landscapes, then takes her or him through their vanishing points.” ―Bonnie Costello, Newsday on Charles Wright

“There is no poet of his generation whose career has unfolded with such genuine authority as Charles Wright's, or whom I read with more astonishment and gratitude.” ―J.D. McClatchy, Poetry on Charles Wright

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0374189668
• ISBN 13: 9780374189662
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 104